Did you know emotional self-awareness and emotional intelligence can earn you more money? In this episode, Dr. Travis Bradberry shares that emotional intelligence is a greater indicator of success than IQ. He even shows how emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness are strongly connected to how much we earn.
Dr. Travis Bradberry, the author of the best-selling book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and the co-founder of TalentSmart, helps us understand how important emotional intelligence is and how we can increase emotional self-awareness.
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
- Our brains are hardwired to react emotionally to what we experience.
- We have an emotional reaction to events before we’re able to reason about them.
- We have more than 400 emotional experiences every single day.
- Emotionally intelligent people tend to do very well in life. They’re able to achieve their goals and interact with people more effectively.
- Emotional intelligence is your capacity for understanding emotions in yourself.
- Four skills involved in emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness:
- Self-awareness.
- Self-management.
- Social awareness.
- Relationship management.
- Your IQ explains about 20% of how you do in life.
- People with average IQs outperformed those with the highest IQs 70% of the time.
- Increasing your EQ emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness:
- Get your stress under control.
- Clean up your sleep hygiene.
- Get your caffeine intake under control.
- Emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness hinge on self-awareness.
- Emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness have a strong connection to earnings.
Transcription: Emotional Self-Awareness – Dr. Travis Bradberry
Kamala Chambers
In this episode, we’re here with Dr. Travis Bradberry where we’re going to be talking about emotional intelligence 2.0 and emotional self-awareness. You gotta check this one out. It’s awesome.
Luis Congdon
I’m excited.
Today, we have Dr. Travis Bradberry. He’s the author of the number one best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0. He’s also the co-founder of TalentSmart, which is a company that helps people understand emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness and helps some of the Fortune 500 top-level CEOs, businesses, and companies understand intelligence and train them through the process of EQ.
It’s an honor to have Dr. Travis Bradberry here with us today.
I am excited. We’ve got Dr. Travis Bradberry here. As you may already be aware, he wrote the book Emotional Intelligence 2.0.
Emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness are something that I don’t think we talk about very much in today’s society. We’re still hung up on IQ and how you can do intellectually and psychologically. But, we don’t talk a lot about how you can do it emotionally and how that affects you as a leader, how that affects you as somebody who’s part of a team, and how that might even affect you more in your success than your ability to put numbers together, strategize on something. If you can’t manage, or regulate your emotions, then you’re going to be strongly hindered.
Without further ado, welcome to the show, Dr. Travis.
Dr. Travis Bradberry
Thanks.
Luis Congdon
It’s great to have you here, and one of the first things I want to ask you is why Emotional Intelligence 2.0? Why is that important, and why did you choose to write this book? Why now?
Why Emotional Intelligence And Emotional Self-Awareness Is Important
Dr. Travis Bradberry
First, the reason that emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness is important is it’s such a critical skill. It’s one that we all possess, and the difficulty is our brains are hardwired to give emotions they apprehend. We have an emotional reaction to events before we’re able to reason about them.
This is a big issue because we have more than 400 emotional experiences every single day. Our brains are hardwired to react emotionally to what we experience.
Emotionally intelligent people tend to do very well in life. They’re able to achieve their goals and interact with people more effectively.
Dr. Travis Bradberry
It’s something that the vast majority of us are not taught in school. It’s something that people need to learn. That connects to Emotional Intelligence 2.0 as well.
Some other books have been written on emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness. The popular ones, in particular, are very conceptual. They teach people what emotional intelligence and self-awareness are.
But, my company TalentSmart, has been training and teaching emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness since 1996. A big thing that we heard and learned from people is that they don’t want to know what it is. They already know what it is. They want to know how to use it, which was the premise behind Emotional Intelligence 2.0.
The book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 shows you how to increase your EQ. It shows you what it is why it’s important, and how it operates. But that’s the smaller portion of the book. The larger parts of the book are these 66 strategies that are aimed to increase your EQ, and that’s our focus. It’s how you can go about improving your EQ.
What Is Emotional Intelligence And Emotional Self-Awareness
Kamala Chambers
I love it. I love that you’ve taken it to the next level.
Before we get into the big level of it, can you just give us a one-sentence synopsis of what emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness are, and then provide us with a few of those steps?
Dr. Travis Bradberry
Sure.
Emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness is your capacity for understanding emotions in yourself; how well you understand them, and how effectively you use that information to respond to them.
On the social side of things, emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness are how well you figure out what’s going on with other people, not just emotionally, but what they’re experiencing, what they’re trying to communicate to you, and how you use that information in managing yourself to manage relationships more effectively.
There are four skills for emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness:
- Self-awareness.
- Self-management.
- Social awareness.
- Relationship management.
Luis Congdon
One of the things I remember reading with one of the first big books that hit people, which came out in a big way, was that book by Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence. That book struck me.
That was a new topic. It was a new conversation, and everybody was going, “Woah. There’s this new thing, and it’s emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness, and it could be more important to your success than IQ.”
Now, we’ve got people like Gary Vaynerchuk, who’s on the internet. In the social media world, he’s one of the big names now, and he publicly says many times over and over, “I’m not that smart of a guy, but I am very emotionally intelligent.” He says that, but he never really extracts that.
Why Emotional Intelligence And Emotional Self-Awareness Is More Valuable Than IQ
Luis Congdon
I’m curious about you, why do you think that emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness might be more important than your IQ? Why do you think some of these big-time CEOs and big-time public figures nowadays are saying, “EQ is the thing, and if you don’t have this, then you’re going to struggle.”
Dr. Travis Bradberry
I think it’s something that people intuitively understand based on their experience. We’ve all seen that individual who may have made it at the top of his or her class or went to the best school, and they’re just kind of a train wreck or a bull in the china shop around the office or their life. What’s holding them back is emotional control, self-awareness, and being able to relate and connect with other people.
It’s easy for them to understand intuitively because they see it in action. But that’s different than actually being able to do something with it. I should also add that the academic research backs this up. It says your IQ only explains about 20% of how you do in life. People with average IQs outperformed those with the highest IQs 70% of the time.
My company is mainly focused on the workplace, and we’ve done a lot of studies comparing people’s emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness scores to their job performance, and we find that it explains about 58% of how people perform in their shows and professions.
Emotional Intelligence and EQ is a far greater indicator of success than your IQ.
Kamala Chambers
I agree with this, and one thing that I’d love to hear from you is just some things that we can do daily to strengthen our emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness.
Related Reading: Develop Emotional Awareness In A Relationship
How To Increase Emotional Intelligence And Emotional Self-Awareness
Dr. Travis Bradberry
It’s an interesting process. There are a couple of things you need to know.
Increasing your EQ is a very individualized process.
That’s why we include the test with the book. When you read Emotional Intelligence 2.0, there’s an envelope in the back with a scratch-off passcode that you can use to go online and take our emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness appraisal test, and it’ll give you your scores. It also shows you which of the book’s 66 strategies will increase your EQ the most.
This is something that we believe so strongly in that we kind of put our money where our mouth is. Before we published that book in 2009, we’d been selling that assessment separately for $40 for a very long time.
I speak to large groups several times a year, and when I would give keynotes, I would say, “I can’t tell you how to increase your EQ because it’s a personalized process, and what works for one person may not work for another.” I found over the years that it was unsatisfactory for people.
I started writing on LinkedIn. A couple of years ago, I joined the influencer program and wrote many articles. It was about 200 so far, and I found that some did much better than people liked, and I got to thinking about them. I realized that these are three things that apply mostly to anyone who can use them to improve his or her EQ.
Increase Emotional Intelligence And Emotional Self-Awareness – Stress Management
Dr. Travis Bradberry
I’ve since incorporated this into my talks. I call them my three silver bullets for increasing your EQ.
- Get your stress under control.
Stress is a necessary emotion. Without it, we don’t take action. We’re kind of in sort of boredom-depression land. As stress increases and motivates you to act, you achieve optimal performance. The problem is, when stress becomes prolonged or too severe, you move into anxiety land, and you melt down where you’re less efficient.
Our brains are wired that we need stress. But, we need to be able to manage it to be more efficient.
Getting your stress under control and being able to have techniques that you use that calm you down are critical to increasing your EQ, emotional intelligence, and emotional self-awareness.
I’ll give you an example of that.
There’s a study conducted at UC Davis where they taught people to cultivate what they called an attitude of gratitude. The experimental group in this study received a calendar reminder several times a day, and the instructions were just to pause and think of something that they were grateful for. Everyone else just did what they normally do.
What they found is that reduced levels of the stress hormone cortisol by 23% in the experimental group. Having these little techniques, like you’re practicing gratitude for someone else, breathing techniques, or mindfulness, can bring your stress levels down and keep your stress from getting too severe.
Luis Congdon
Yeah.
It makes me think of a study that I read about people who had repeated heart attacks, and it was something that was in their family. Other family members had that. Their parents may have had that.
Increase Emotional Intelligence And Emotional Self-Awareness – Sleep Hygiene
Luis Congdon
One of the things that this doctor tried to focus on instead of the medicine, and all the traditional ways that they might treat people with repeat heart attacks, is that he had them do stress-reducing activities.
This wasn’t like some major study where we have an enormous significant number to go off of in a big university, but it’s still something to look at. What this particular doctor found when he had the patients just do simple things like breathing techniques or practicing gratitude, their heart attacks didn’t return. These patients got way better, and their health changed.
You’re getting something powerful. It is that we can change our emotional intelligence in a relationship and emotional self-awareness just simply by incorporating these simple little exercises as you mentioned.
Dr. Travis Bradberry
Yeah.
It’s a matter of being cognizant of it and aware of what you’re experiencing and then being able to react to it and do something different as a result. That leads to my second silver bullet, which is a big one for a lot of people.
2. Clean up your sleep hygiene.
During the day, as a byproduct of normal neuronal activity, toxic proteins build up in your brain. These proteins can only be removed adequately or removed when you get a night of adequate sleep; it’s a certain duration of sleep and high-quality sleep.
A lot of us can’t get more sleep. If you have kids, you have to get up early for work. Perhaps there are only a certain number of hours you’re only going to be able to sleep. But something that almost all of us can do is to improve the quality of our sleep.
Emotional Intelligence And Emotional Self-Awareness – Sleep Hygiene And What Not To Do
Dr. Travis Bradberry
If you have a couple of glasses of wine or take a Benadryl or an Ambien, or anything to make you feel sleepy can significantly impair the quality of your sleep and diminish your brain’s ability to remove these toxic proteins from your brain.
The way emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness are affected is these toxic proteins diminish self-control. It’s one of the biggest things that happen from fatigue. It also makes you fat, although it doesn’t have anything to do with emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness. It’s just an excellent motivation for a lot of people. When you don’t get enough sleep, your metabolism slows, and your body produces the hormone that makes you feel full.
Sleep hygiene is a big one. I’ll mention one more thing that can help people when it comes to sleep hygiene. That is no blue light in the evening.
Sunlight in the morning is high in blue wavelength light or blue frequency light, and this halts melatonin production. It makes you feel alert. In the afternoon, if you think about sunsets, they’re warm. They’re orange and red, and sunlight in the afternoon is very low in blue wavelength light. That allows your body to produce melatonin and prepare you to go to sleep.
Being exposed to natural light is all well and good except what we do after dinner is we bathe ourselves in blue light. It comes from computers, from the iPad, and it halts your melatonin production. It makes it harder for you to fall asleep, and when you do fall asleep, you have a lower quality sleep. That’s another big one about cleaning up your sleep hygiene.
Kamala Chambers
Yeah. We interviewed on the topic of blue light, and it is something I find compelling to cut back on the blue light before we go to sleep.
Related Reading: 5 Ways An Online Marriage Course Mends Relationships
Increase Emotional Intelligence And Emotional Self-Awareness – Caffeine Control
Kamala Chambers
I’d love to get into that third silver bullet.
Dr. Travis Bradberry
Yeah, sure.
3. Get your caffeine intake under control.
I usually get groans from the audience when I bring up this one. Caffeine causes your body to release adrenaline. If you drink too much of it, you might have a low EQ moment right then. But the biggest problem that it causes for people is it’s bad for your sleep hygiene
Caffeine has a long half-life. It has a six-hour half-life. So if you’re having an espresso at 3 in the afternoon and want to go to bed at 9, 50% of that caffeine will still be metabolically active in your body. It’s going to keep you awake and the blue light, if you do fall asleep, is bad for your quality of sleep.
My suggestion for your caffeine intake to be under control is just to try not to drink too much. But when you do drink caffeine, try to stop around noon or midday. That allows enough of it to work its way out in your system that your sleep should be alright.
Kamala Chambers
What I find is if I drink caffeine, eat sugars, or don’t eat very well, my agitation levels go up.
Do you suggest we find those things that make us feel better and make us feel more agitated, and be mindful of this stuff?
Dr. Travis Bradberry
Yes.
Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence in a relationship.
Dr. Travis Bradberry
It all hinges on self-awareness.
Not only are there differences in how you feel emotions and the type of things that push your buttons. There are physical differences too. People have their circadian rhythms. People have different levels of sensitivity to blue light.
Earn More Money With Emotional Intelligence And Emotional Self-Awareness
Dr. Travis Bradberry
People certainly have varying levels of sensitivity to caffeine and how it impacts their behavior.
Part of self-aware is to understand how the stuff affects you and have your regimen for managing that and getting things under control.
Kamala Chambers
Absolutely.
Before we close out, is there anything else that you want our listeners to walk away with?
Dr. Travis Bradberry
One other thing I’ll add is that in studying emotional intelligence and emotional self-awareness, we found that it has an adamant connection to earnings.
We find that every one-point increase in EQ adds about $13,000 to people’s annual salary.
If EQ impacts your job performance, it ought to affect your earnings as well, and it certainly does.
Luis Congdon
What I love about this interview and everything that you shared, and it’s something that when you go over to Amazon, if you check out the book Emotional Intelligence 2.0, one of the things that you’ll see is that hundreds and hundreds of people have read this book. It has a lot of fantastic reviews. Some of the most thorough reviews I’ve ever seen on Amazon.
People love this book, and one of the things that people have said repeatedly is that this book was very easy to digest. It had an incredible resource sheet. That thing that you scratch off and then you can go over to the website, and you can go in there, and you can take the test. That test is fantastic. It’ll teach you a lot about yourself.
Making Emotional Intelligence And Emotional Self-Awareness Easy
Luis Congdon
But one of the things that I got out of the book and got out of this time with you is how simple this can be, and it was looping back around right now to the very beginning of our interview where you said a lot of books like Daniel Goleman‘s book, Emotional Intelligence. I love it, but one of the things about it is it’s complicated. For me, it was a complex, dense book. It was trying to make a statement about EQ.
Your book is saying we know EQ is there. We are mindful of the fact that if we have more balanced emotions, if our emotions are better, if we’re more aware of ourselves and other people, and we can cultivate healthy relationships, then that’s great. Let’s get that out of the way now. Let’s talk about how to improve this.
One of the things that you have done such a fantastic job today, and you’ve done it in your book, is you made it very accessible. This doesn’t have to be rocket science. It doesn’t have to be super complicated.
One of the things that I love about what you said is that, if you do this and you take the time to do it, it will affect your earnings at work as well.
Dr. Travis Bradberry
Yeah, absolutely.
Luis Congdon
We appreciate your time here Dr. Travis. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show.
Dr. Travis, thank you so much for coming.
Dr. Travis Bradberry
Thanks for having me.
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